"Low bowls with flowers, as well as flowers placed on the tablecloth and a platter of fruit, are the most beautiful table decorations. All table centrepieces with rocks, palm trees, ostriches, deer, and such are ludicrous, for these things have no business on a table, and all tall table decorations - even those made of flowers - are also unsuitable since they screen the dinner guests from one another", opined Ellen Key of table culture in her 1899 essay Beauty in the Home.1 But that was then.
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Without wanting to in any way detract from the work undertaken by Kunsthochschule Berlin Weissensee students in the past year, a highlight of our visit to the 2017 Rundgang summer exhibition was the thunderstorm which broke while we there. Calling it biblical would be to trivialise the ferocity with which it smit the day asunder, turning in its fury the Bühringstraße in front of the school into a Bühring Straits. And the first of three storms which broke over Berlin in quick succession, almost
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As East Berlin's Art and Design College the Kunsthochschule Berlin Weissensee was in many ways symbolic of East Germany's difficult relationship with Bauhaus and the legacy of inter-war functionalism. On the one hand the DDR needed the reduced, cost effective, mass-market, industrial objects striven for during the period. On the other a need to define a new, socialist, tradition for the new, socialist, state meant an almost dogmatic rejection of everything associated with the pre-war "Germany",
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Some 24 hours after finding ourselves in the same corridor as Axel Kufus at the Universität der Künste 2014 Rundgang our paths crossed that of Hella Jongerius at the Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin Rundgang. It’s just how it is in Berlin…… And as with the UdK Rundgang, in terms of product/industrial the 2014 show at Weißensee was/is, in our opinion, somewhat smaller than in previous editions, did/does however present a highly entertaining review of the past years work and so neatly explains
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Returning to Berlin from Einblick at the Fachhochschule Potsdam the next stage on our 2011 summer tour was Rundgang 2011 at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee. The 2011 Product Design Graduate Show was staged in a former supermarket under the title "Kaufhalle wird Kunsthalle" - a name which translates as "A Supermarket becomes an art gallery" and which for us was a very fitting title because although there were a couple of projects that we enjoyed looking at, there was nothing that we would
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The last stage of the (smow)summer tour 2010 took us across Berlin to the Kunsthochschule Weißensee. Established in 1946 the Kunsthochschule Berlin Weißensee was without question the youngest design school on our tour - and was also the location where the most English was spoken. Every corridor, every landing, every exhibition room straining to the tones of American and other non-native English. Combined with the preferred clothing order the impression was much more Berlin-Mitte than
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